The Making of InterNetWork

It all began one fateful day in March. There I was: sitting in my Type in Motion classroom, probably talking to Emily and Leah about the latest entertaining thing I’d found on Tumblr…when we were interrupted by the voice of John Vorwald. This is a common occurrence (seeing as he is our professor) but this time, he was introducing Project 2: a television network branding.

I thought long and hard about all of my interests, how I spend my time in a given day, and what topic I could focus my network on that would keep me most interested throughout the project. Of course, I punctuated this thought process checking Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, email, and Twitter. And then I realized: the internet is really freaking rad. And it should be a TV star.

I started by creating a list of words that came to mind when I thought of the internet. I made a sort-of casual “mission statement” for the network, and then started thinking of shows that would air on it. Some of the shows I came up with are things that are currently YouTube series (like Know Your Meme and some of the Nerdfighters/Vlogbrothers videos). I actually made a Reddit post asking for other show ideas (why not ask the internet about the internet?), but unfortunately, no one responded.

After I had a solid idea of what the network would be, I thought about my target audience. Who would watch this? I came up with tech-savvy (or at least internet-savvy) people, probably between teenage to early 30s. Flashback Fridays and Obsoletion would be aimed to please those older viewers who were there to witness the glorious birth of internet memes, viral videos, etc. Shows like Virus would keep up with the latest viral videos, appeasing the younger crowd (or anyone with a short attention span and a YouTube homepage). 

I finally started thinking of what the actual animation would look like, and what I wanted to do for a logo. I decided to go with a pixel-font logo. The assignment required that we create 3 ID bumps, 3 schedules, and 3 lower-thirds graphics. I wanted to keep each one kind of tied together, so the ID bumps were all focused on memes, the lower-thirds graphics were the way that we interact with the internet (typing, clicking, tablet swiping), and the schedules were ways that we connect with other people/the internet tries to connect with us.

Finally, I gathered footage and stills from around the web, and got to work. I even created a fake Tumblr account for one of the schedule lists.

I also came across some really hilarious things while I was researching. When I was looking for a buddy icon for the girl character of the AIM schedule, I found this great comment section:

There was also one for a make-up icon with at least ten comments saying things like “i like dis bcuz i like makeup LOL”

Finally, it all came together into this:

InterNetWork Branding from Maddy Settle on Vimeo.

Happy Pi Day!

Happy #pi day from the stuff around my room! :) sorry for not rounding the end, haha. vine.co/v/bdrlWlYxAi1

March 14, 2013

Reboot!

I had some issues with my Tumblr being connected to other blogs, so here’s to a fresh start! If you followed me before, please re-follow now :)